Teaching in the 21st Century - Reflection Post

“Learning isn’t easy! Students today must take in and process substantial amounts of information while keeping up with the demands and distractions of their fast paced world. But teaching isn’t easy either! Teachers have the challenge of engaging their students to the point where they can focus on the material at hand, imbibing information and exploring new ideas and concepts.” As I wrote these thoughts in my first blog at the beginning of my practicum experience, I had no idea that they would be the very challenges I would face in Mrs. Lewia’s third grade classroom at Bloomfield Elementary. I have realized that being a teacher in the 21st century depends on one’s ability to energetically and uniquely present the subject material so that students can develop their desire to learn while staying in line with the standardized state goals and learning results.

Teachers cannot possibly do their jobs effectively if they do not employ technology in some way, shape, or form in their classrooms and curriculums. Today’s students need to be constantly stimulated, and many of these students require differentiated instruction to help them grasp new concepts. Employing technology in the classroom is an effective method for developing more independent and creative thinkers. Having computers in the classroom allows students to think and explore beyond what is on the page of a textbook and gives them the opportunity to expand their horizons.

This semester, I have found so many different ways to incorporate technology into the classroom. The way I see it, I-pods, You-Tube, and blogs not just for entertainment anymore. Students who have trouble reading can download the audio book on iTunes and hear the words as they follow along in the actual text. You-Tube, and its teacher friendly counterpart, Teacher-Tube, is a great ways to get students excited about homework assignments. Who wouldn’t want to have to watch a video on Bill Nye the Science Guy to learn about density and mass? Blogs have more academic value than I ever thought possible. Having a class Wiki page to post work to and review the work of fellow classmates gives students the chance to be proud of what they’ve accomplished, while also learning from their classmates.

The tools above do not even begin to encompass what technology has to offer a classroom full of students. Schools with a more substantial budget can afford SMART Boards and carts of laptops to reserve for lessons that will get students actively participating. These tools do not require any specialized training to be adept at using them, and their capacity to take a lesson from a lecture and worksheet to an Internet exploration and assessment is well worth the battle to procure such incredible technology.

There are so many little ways where teachers are already dealing with technology; it is a wonder that so many teachers today are afraid of it being too difficult to use or of it taking away from students’ learning. It is truly impossible not to deal with technology in the 21st century, and the ability to incorporate it into lessons gives teachers the opportunity to sit back while students take control of their own learning experiences. Teaching in the 21st century does not mean spending every second of every day in the computer lab. It means responsibly using the resources technology has made available to enable students to become deeper thinkers, more creative problem-solvers, and more engaged learners.

Sink or Float! (Third Grade Math and Science Unit)

Hi Myra!

Hi Myra!

My name is Liz. How are you? I am glad it is Friday today. How is school going?

I thought I would tell you about myself. I live in Maine. I love Maine. I love to swim in the lakes during the summer, and play in the leaves in the fall. I also love when it is cold and I can go ice skating.

My favorite color is purple. Do you have a favorite color? I love to shop and find nice clothes that are purple. I think my favorite color is purple because I love grapes.

This weekend I am going to a birthday party. I love to visit with my friends. They are nice. I hope you have a fun weekend!

Sincerely,
Liz

ACTEM Conference 2008

Top Ten Lessons / Cool Facts from ACTEM Conference 10/17/08

1. Teaching in the 21st Century: Social networking was a prevalent theme in the keynote speech as well as in this session because in today’s world, so many people are connected to social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Bringing tools such as these into a classroom setting would allow students access to one another to answer questions on homework, upcoming due dates, and the day’s discussions. Teachers can post important class information, as well as link supplemental educational tools like games, podcasts, and I movies.

2. Google Docs: Google Docs is a system that helps you create online documents that can be downloaded, edited, and posted, all from one location. The system allows a teacher, for example, to post a group assignment online and track progress and revisions of the work done by each student. The Google Doc can be posted on a blog. The only downside is that students must sign up for a Google account first, and teachers must purchase a Google domain.

3. www.readwritethink.org: This website has a diverse range of resources and organizational tools that will help even the most reluctant writer to form thoughtful and meaningful essays. There are visual organizers like “wordle” and “bubbl.us” as well as gliffy.com, which allows for group collaboration. Other websites include: readthewords.com, studystack.com, pageflakes.com, and persuadestar.4teachers.org.

4. Be clickable!: I have always feared that anyone could go online and Google me to find anything and everything that has been posted about me on the Internet. I thought it was bad to have personal information or pictures available to everyone. One of the lessons I learned from the speaker and the sessions was that being “clickable” is actually very important in today’s world. For teachers, being “clickable” means being available, resourceful, and creative. It means showing the world, or at least Grandma from Texas, what you and your students are capable of!

5. Delicious!: Keeping bookmarked sites on your toolbar is not helpful to your students or colleagues. By signing up for an account on Delicious, you can keep track of all the websites you have used for different units over the years. The site provides a library of resources for you, and a starting point for students who may need help finding solid resources for projects.

6. SMARTboards (with projectors!): I fell in love with the interactive whiteboards several years ago, but I had no idea they could do so much! One of the SMARTboards on display came with an overhead projector. This eliminates the need for a separate projector and screen elsewhere in a classroom, freeing up space, and saving time with setup.

7. www.wordle.net: This sweet graphic organizer allows the user to take a block of text and transform it into a collage of key words and terms. The most commonly used words are the most large and prominent, and lesser words and terms are sized progressively smaller according to their use. It is aesthetically pleasing, and is a fun jump-start into poetry.

8. Let your voice be heard: By signing up for an account, you are able to create a place for your students to use their imaginations and improve their speaking skills. Like GarageBand, you are able to record your own voice. Even better, though, is the fact that you can create your own pictures in the same place with a Pixie like program. Students can doodle over posted pictures and comment on the work of their classmates. It is a wonderful teaching tool with so many opportunities to help students develop technological skills as well as speaking skills.

9. www.freerice.com: This amazing site incorporates learning, fun, and social service! Teachers can get their students to practice their skills in several different content areas on various levels of difficulty while helping to feed people in third world countries. It is a fun, online game that will definitely give students a reason to study hard and know the answers.

10. Flickr: Like Delicious, Flickr is an online organizational tool that allows you to store and file your digital pictures. A Flickr account may be shared between two classrooms from different parts of the world; students can keep photographic journals of their lives in one country, and learn about the lives of children their own age from a completely different continent

WebQuest Questions!

My goal for this WebQuest is to have students learn more about the life and times of Queen Elizabeth I.

1. Why should Elizabeth be queen?
a. Topic: Allow students to come up with their own qualifications of a good ruler.
b. Grade level: 5th
c Task: Now that Queen Mary has died, it is up to you, as part of a royal council, to decide who will become the next ruler of England. You must determine the qualities the new monarch must have, and argue for your favorite candidate.
d. Roles: 1. Ambassador: You must think of how the next ruler will affect your country.
2. Petitioner: You must keep the interests of the poor and marginalized in mind.
3. Cardinal: You must be sure the new leader has the ability to be well rounded and fair.

2. How will you reach your people as a ruler?
a. Topic: You are the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth I. You desperately want the people to like you, so you feel you need to reach out to the general public.
b. Grade level: 8th
c. Task: Create a modern day political commercial to advocate for you and your privy council, explaining what your policies and goals are for the country.
d. Roles: 1. Public relations: You will help to be sure the Queen knows the problems her country is facing and think of ways to make positive changes.
2. Campaign leader: You will help the Queen put her best foot forward, helping to display her qualities to the general public.
3. Lobbyist: You will help round up supporters who are willing to ally themselves with England, and help them show their support for the Queen.
4. The Queen: You must win the people’s hearts by demonstrating your dedication to everyone who works for you and by clearly outlining your personal goals.

3. What is it like in Queen Elizabeth’s court?
a. Topic: You are a subject of Queen Elizabeth I. As the new Queen settles in, you attempt to learn all you can about the new ruler. There’s no place better for fresh gossip than a fresh and extravagant court!
b. Grade level: 5th
c. Task: Create a gossip column detailing the exciting goings-on of Queen Elizabeth’s court, making sure to include why this news is so catchy.
d. Roles: 1. Lady in Waiting: You must uncover all the Queen’s most juicy secrets.
2. Privy Council Member: You need to keep track of the Queen’s latest policies, her marriage proposals, and her list of worst enemies.
3. Page boy/ girl: You have to spy on the wealthy court members to find out who is trying to gain favor with the Queen and if anyone is trying to take the Queen’s place.

4. Theatre and the Throne
a. Topic: As a member of the Elizabethan court, you love the work of William Shakespeare and want to compose a piece for the Queen using his style.
b. Grade level: 8th
c. Task: To entertain the Queen when the playwright is away, you compose your own ballad or sonnet to sing the praises of the Queen’s reign.
d. Roles: 1. Muse: You inspire compositions for the Queen through your stories of her qualities as a ruler.
2. Composer: You determine the melody or mood of the piece
3. Lyricist / Poet: You are responsible for the careful wording of the ballad or sonnet in honor of the Queen.
4. Choreographer / Artist: You devise a physical display of dance or art to accentuate the

Learning Made Accessable

The students, not the teacher, rule a classroom. The students who have been dismissed for ages as difficult learners are not at fault for their inability to grasp the concepts presented to them. Whether or not these children have any sort of disability, it is the curriculum that has been disabling productive, active learning in classrooms. With the technology teachers have available to them today, they can adapt their teaching methods to provide for the different learning styles of their diverse group of students.
According to the CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) website, located at http://www.cast.org/publications/UDLguidelines/version1.html, the organization’s goal is to “create built environments and tools that are useable by as many people as possible.” The classroom is not just a place where the teacher creates the classroom environment and develops a curriculum based around what works best for him or her; in fact, it is a location that must be adaptable and useable for approximately 20 uniquely different learners. A classroom should be accessible to students with physical disabilities, students with mental handicaps, and even children who are gifted and talented. Creating an inclusive environment is much easier with the help of technology like individual headsets, large print readers, and descriptive films. I think going into a computer lab and having everyone put on headphones while looking at a web page on the habitats of the Amazon jungles would be an ideal way of employing assistive technology. The students who just need to concentrate on reading can use the headphones to block out excess noise, while students who need help with pronouncing the new vocabulary can have the website read to them as they listen through headphones.
America has implemented the No Child Left Behind Act in order to get students on the same level. The amendment of the Rehabilitation Act, as described in Section 508, ensures that the technology will be there for students with disabilities who would otherwise be left behind. I fully intend to make this law work for me as a teacher so that I can offer assistive technology in my classroom. I believe that whether or not a child has disabilities, they should have options as to how they are presented with curriculum materials. It is highly unlikely that I will not have someone requiring special needs of some sort in my classroom, and the Federal assistance that would be available to them could be used to help the entire class.
The Maine State Library (MSL) offers a variety of outreach services that allow for people who are blind, or who are reading impaired, to utilize talking book programs, large print books, and descriptive video. These tools allow the student to keep up with and enjoy the same readings as the rest of the class. The descriptive videos supplement the dialogue going on in the film, giving a more in depth description of the actions that can be heard, but not seen. Some descriptive videos even have to do with math, history, and science. Because there are so many different learning styles in one classroom, I see no reason not to use descriptive videos with a class that really has no evident physical challenges. Hearing the narrator spell out the steps of dividing fractions AND hearing the description of the physical placement of each number as it is manipulated would be invaluable to learners who need that audio-visual reinforcement.
While many teachers might see registering for the MSL’s outreach assistance as time consuming and frustrating, the fact is that having this technology to assist their students will make teaching their class far easier in the end. Teachers who work with their students’ disabilities instead of following their own agendas will have to appreciate how well the class is able to flow. Imagine one less student having to leave for a Special Education class because he or she can just follow along with assistive technology? It is possible, and it is the responsibility of today’s teachers to use assistive resources to everyone’s advantage.

Second try

Learning isn’t easy! Students today must take in and process substantial amounts of information while keeping up with the demands and distractions of their fast paced world. But teaching isn’t easy either! Teachers have the challenge of engaging their students to the point where they can focus on the material at hand, imbibing information and exploring new ideas and concepts. A lack of communication between the two sides of the educational spectrum has the potential to create a technological barrier, often making teaching and learning irrelevant and inefficient. Teachers and students must work together, using the latest technology and sharing individual skills and interests in order to create an educational environment that is both effective and exciting.

As technology first started to appear in the classroom, the students were the ones eager to venture into the new realms of opportunity that the Internet and its many applications presented. Teachers, still teaching the importance of neat handwriting and independent research in the library, were weary of a technological dependency that would erase mental math, proper vocabulary / spelling, and intensive research from their curriculums forever more. However, it is clear that in using the alternative medias technology has to offer, students and teachers have actually found ways to learn together, and gain deeper insights than those neatly phrased in textbooks.

In the article entitled “Write the Truth” (2007), a fifth grade teacher was presented with a teaching moment when his class wondered how many of the presidents of the United States owned slaves before deciding that slavery really was not such a good thing. The students, when asked what should be done to uncover the truth, were eager to check history books and the Internet. What they found was unsettling, even to these young students. Nowhere in their history text was any mention of racism or national leaders who subscribed to the practice. By employing detailed searches on well-known search engines, the students were able to develop a list of slave-owning presidents. The students were distressed that the textbook writers did not want them learning the harsh reality about the revered leaders, and took action to ask that the text be revised and clarified. In this scenario, the Internet was a valuable tool and allowed the students to actively participate in deeper learning.

In the same way, two sister elementary school classrooms from Canada and Greece were communicating with each other online in order to learn more about the opposite culture. The article “DiaLogos: A Sister Class Exchange between Greece and Canada” (2007) explains that amidst an effort to provide more information on Ancient Greece, a student realized that some of the Parthenon’s wreckage was unfairly named for the British lord who took them. This spurred the class in Greece to write to the editors of the magazine who had published this erroneous information. The confidence that this effort provided the students must have helped them to recognize the power they had as individuals to take a stand and make a difference – and it might not have happened if the intrigued Canadian student had not emailed that question across an ocean.

If teachers and students today can work together to close the gap between “old school” teaching methods and newer technological resources, a common ground may be found. This common ground allows for the “Type II” teaching methods, (as described in the article “Do Something Disruptive” on Mike Muir’s blog page) including podcasts, graphing calculators, and word processors, to engage young students with materials and medias they are familiar and comfortable with, while enabling teachers to encourage a deeper exploration of age old concepts. Teachers who are able to show their students that Ipods and You-Tube are for more than just music and videos will have provided their students with effective and exciting learning tools that can be used anytime, anywhere.

Technology and Learning in Today's World

I just learned how to do a new post!

Lesson #1

As a first time blogger, I don't really know what I'm doing. I have always been scared to post information online, but I'm sure this will be a good educational tool more than anything else. I really hope that this semester goes well, and that by the end of this class, I will be able to use computers in ways I never could have dreamed of.